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Art is not an absolute which appears in all cultures, but rather a primarily Western social institution, developed in the Renaissance and later in order to instrument various human desires. There has never been absolute agreement on its function, and various critical schools have argued for a wide range of definitions extending from imitation of the 'real' world, through the creation of beauty, to the construction of new realities. All theories, however, place art at the centre of culture and attribute to it in some form the power in man to control, order, and unify the world. Romantic aesthetics, beginning about the middle of the eighteenth century and continuing to the present, emphasize the deep mind as the source of art and treat imagination as the power which perceives the profound truths and the fundamental unity underlying the world. This psychological emphasis in aesthetics found its scientific parallel in Freudian Psychoanalysis, which provided it not only with the needed scientific support but also with a complete critical theory, explaining the origin, form, and function of art in the individual psyche and in society. Romantic aesthetics and Psychoanalysis are in remarkable agreement on such matters as the functioning of the psyche and the 'style' in which it expresses itself, but are ultimately in conflict over the meaning of the projected image, the symbol or art work. For Psychoanalysis it remains a distorted and disguised form of a simpler, more fundamental truth. For the Romantic artist it is an irreducible statement of a full and complex truth.